‘Empire’ built from an idea

David Lynch is one of the greatest American filmmakers working outside the studio system. So it might come as a surprise to hear him speak favorably of the milieu he seems to avoid.

“I just love all of Hollywood and the studios and the kind of dream of it,” he says during a recent visit to the District. “That golden age of cinema is alive in the air in L.A. It’s just fantastic to me. And I like ideas and stories that come out of that.”

Mr. Lynch’s last two films did. “Mulholland Dr.,” which got Mr. Lynch his third Oscar nomination for best director, follows an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) who befriends an amnesiac (Laura Harring). “Inland Empire,” which opened here last week, stars Laura Dern as an actress confusing her own life with that of the role she’s playing.

Though they both have some sharp satire, the director never set out to be biting.

“Say you decided, ‘I’m going to make a film which pokes fun at Hollywood.’ That to me puts the cart right smack in front of the horse. It’s so strange to think that way,” he says.

But character development might mean that, as in “Inland Empire,” your movie star character must be helped into his clothes by two female assistants. It’s a wry moment.

“But it’s not to do something against something,” he says. “It just comes with the idea.”

In fact, to just about every question about Mr. Lynch’s work, it seems the response is something like: “It’s the ideas.”

If there’s one word Mr. Lynch uses more than “ideas,” it’s “love.” The filmmaker’s mostly uncompromised career, which includes “Blue Velvet” and the television series “Twin Peaks,” has been one long, passionate love affair.

“As soon as you fall in love with even a fragment of the whole, you’re hooked. You know what you’re going to be doing, it’s so exciting. Then your job is to translate those ideas to cinema,” says Mr. Lynch over a latte (a couple pots of hotel coffee and an empty Starbucks cup are also visible in the room).

“Inland Empire” took years to film, because it was never meant to be a feature. He shot a single scene — he won’t reveal which one — and left it at that. Then he shot an unrelated scene. “Lo and behold, some ideas came that started uniting those scenes,” he recalls. He wrote the script as he shot.

He describes it as “thrilling,” but when asked if he’ll do it again, he quickly says no.

“It happened in an innocent way, and it worked out,” he says. “But I think there’s something to working things out in the script first.”

Mr. Lynch describes how he develops his enigmatic films. “In the beginning, I don’t know anything. Then you get an idea and you know something. Then you know a little bit more with another idea. Ideas are talking to you,” he says. “It’s like there’s the completed puzzle in another room, and someone keeps popping pieces of it over to you.”

“Inland Empire” has one meaning for its maker. But he doesn’t expect that to hold for every viewer.

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